Book cover contest (including $$ prize)

Eszter:

Getting a book published at a major university press is a big deal, and you deserve all the congratulations you get. But you need to know that the ‘contest’ over at Worth1000 is basically an invitation to designers to do what’s known in the trade as ‘spec work’. It’s professionally frowned upon–AIGA among other professional design organizations strongly discourages its members from participating in these sorts of contests–and not likely to attract the best design proposals. Frankly, I’m surprised Michigan is farming out the cover this way.

Ezster, I’m assuming nothing of the sort on either count, and I agree with you about the quality of the typical methods textbook cover. And I’m sorry to derail what you thought was a pretty straightforward post about your book–for which, again, you deserve a lot of credit.

But we academics tend to have a pretty uninformed idea of what design costs, or should cost–even what looks like very simple design. It’s not just us; there’s a strong tendency in Western, or at least US, culture, to undervalue design, to think of it as essentially ‘decoration’, something that happens as an afterthought, and that shouldn’t cost very much. Or, something that we should assume everyone can do well, or at least competently, and that judgments of quality are really just veiled expressions of taste, and, well, de gustibus non disputandem est and ‘let a thousand flowers bloom and everyone take a turn’ and all that. Desktop publishing hasn’t helped much, either; more people have the tools to do (some of) the work than did thirty years ago.

So it seems natural that when a city, or company, or a book publisher wants to have a design contest and give the winner a bit of cash, we have a hard time seeing why that might be a problem. (For the record, the going rate for commercial design work is $50-100/hr depending on where you live, and you’d be surprised by how long it takes to do even what looks like a simple job. Part of the reason it looks simple is the amount of practice the person had before they did it.)

Being something of a type nerd and hanging out on typography and design sites, and listening to the folks whose job it is to do this kind of work (yes, even designing methods textbook covers) has cured me of some of this ignorance, as has being married to a fine artist and now design student. But I’m not a designer; I’m an aspiring political theorist. It’s not my place to quote chapter and verse from AIGA’s explanation of why they oppose spec work; I just happen to know their position, and I think it makes a lot of sense. And I don’t think your book will by itself bury the design industry.

But as universities find more and more ways to replace faculty with administration, devalue research that doesn’t earn the big bucks or translate into patentable technologies, and rationalize the transformation of students into clients and instructional staff into service providers in the name of ‘pedagogy’, I thought that the defense of design in this regard–it’s good to support the work of those who do quality work and not support practices that undermine them–might resonate among this blog’s contributors and readers, for the same reason that we would agree with the argument that it’s not a good idea for a university to replace its tenured faculty with low-paid adjuncts teaching four and four–even if the adjuncts really like teaching and need the money.

The weird thing, though, is that if the University of Michigan Press listened to your idea because they really were worried about money, they could have offered a perfectly ethical alternative: to ask the students in UM’s design program to design the cover. Or they could have suggested to you that you offer it to Northwestern’s design students.

How much would the publisher normally pay for the design of the cover?

I have no idea. I can certainly say that none of the people involved are getting rich from this. It should be seen much more as a labor of love/interest in the research enterprise than anything else. Seemingly, Maurice would be much better equipped to answer that question. I maintain that Maurice likely doesn’t appreciate the budgets involved in academic publishing.

I’m confused: you have no idea what going rates are for cover design, but you’re confident that Maurice is overestimating them — even though you also think he knows this area better than you do.

I understand this is a labor of love for you, but presumably for design professionals, it’s one of the ways they make a living. Is it necessarily a good thing when people are asked to do something that’s usually paid work for a nominal prize and a mention in the acknowledgements instead. (Of course the world is full of unpaid internships…)

I don’t know that it’s a universal rule that you have “no right to play/With what was another man’s work for gain.” But it does seem like there are some genuine ethical questions here that are worth thinking about. I mean, presumably if Northwestern held a contest online to invite the general public to teach courses in place of tenured facutly (for $$ prizes!), you would see some problems, no?

I make something like a living–some years a bit less than your average NYC cab driver, some years a bit more than a cab driver–from designing book covers. My, um, career as a cover designer is kinda successful. I’d bet everyone commenting here has a book or two I’ve designed on their shelves. I’ve sold 50 to 75 covers a year for last ten years. Most of that work was for what’s left of the trade houses in NY and London. Maybe 25% of the covers were for various university presses.

Here’s my two cents:

I usually follow the AIGA guidelines–so no work on spec. This is, essentially, a spec offer so, no, I wouldn’t bother submitting a design.

$700 to $2000 is, more or less, the going rate for this kind of book. (At at minimum, it takes me a day an and a half to make comps, a half day revising comps, a half day making the mechanical, and a half day on the phone/billing/etc. I figure that works out to roughly $20 to $40 an hour, depending on the job. That’s not including proofing/ftp/overhead/coffee or any art permissions. Do the math and you’ll figure, correctly, that I work a lot more than 40 hours a week.)

If UMP was offering more or less what it costs them for a title with similar expectations, I wouldn’t have a problem with this. However, $150 is insulting. Why not at least offer, oh, $500 worth of UMP books along with, say, $500 for the design fee.

It’s worth noting that it’s fairly easy to pull together a low resolution .jpeg of a cover design. It’s somewhat harder to make that design work in print and to flesh out the rest of the cover in a style that is acceptable to most publishers. For $150, you are asking for production problems. I wouldn’t say this contest is “despicable” but it is dumb, if you are looking for good design. I’d guess the odds of an in-house designer/production person at UMP having to spend far more time with this cover than usual are fairly high. Why not put those resources into hiring a good designer or running a fair contest?

This is all true, alas, even at perfectly respectable publisher houses:
” there’s a strong tendency in Western, or at least US, culture, to undervalue design, to think of it as essentially ‘decoration’, something that happens as an afterthought, and that shouldn’t cost very much. Or, something that we should assume everyone can do well, or at least competently, and that judgments of quality are really just veiled expressions of taste, and, well, de gustibus non disputandem est and ‘let a thousand flowers bloom and everyone take a turn’ and all that. “